Monday, May 13, 2013

A few month have past, this my last WebMiner update. In the meantime I finished my Master Thesis, moved to a new location and started my new job. Perfect time to release a new version with the changes I have made since.

The Nepomuk WebMiner 0.6 adds beside several bugfixes:

User changeable regular expression for the filename parsing.

Removed its own and reuse the Nepomuk internal fileindexing to get id3 tags and other file metadata.

Add whitelist for automatic web search. You might like to lookup the folder with your publication pdfs but not your private documents. Or the network share with your tvshows, but not your private family videos. This works on top of the Nepomuk whitelist. So you Nepomuk can index these files, but not all of them will be websearched.

Instead of the dull treeview that shows the raw fetched metadata, you can now see and edit the metadata in several fancy edit fields.

You can find the latest release on projects.kde.org or the tarball on kde-apps.org.
Even though I wanted to get this into KDE SC 4.11, I doubt this is going to happen. Soft feature freeze is around the corner and I don't feel comfortable enough to let this be part of SC and annoy all users with this service yet. There are still a lot of usability problems I like to have solved properly before this can be part of of any KDE installation.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

We are proud to announce the final 2.0 release for the KDE Wacom Tablet KCM. A lot has changed since the last proper 1.3.8 release. Most noticeable to the user are the new and better multi-monitor handling and the enhanced expressbutton features.

The list of all fixes:* Fixed bug which would prevent the default profile from being created properly.* Fixed bug which made it impossible to use some special keys as express button shortcut.* Fixed bug where the plasma applet would not rotate the stylus controls.* Fixed bug which displayed the tablet in an inverted rotation if auto-rotate was selected.* Fixed bug which prevented the screen mappings from being applied correctly when the tablet was rotated.* Fixed bug which would not allow to set a screen mapping on the touch device.* Fixed bug where invalid area mappings would make the stylus stick in the upper left corner.* Changed way how tablets are reset to their full tablet mapping to fix problems with Intuos 5 tablets.* Added some more tablets to the tablet database.* Updated button hardware mappings for the Intuos 5 Touch.* Disabled Waltop devices in the database as they are in conflict with some Wacom devices.* Improved button shortcut handling.* Improved handling of auto-rotation.* Tablet areas can now be selected for each screen independently.* All screen mapping can now be handled with one dialog.* Global shortcut to switch between Fullscreen and a single Monitor.* Tablet and touch area selection now takes the rotation settings into account.* Added feature which allows the user to invert the scroll direction of the touch device.* Many bugfixes in the background.

On the code side, I have fixed several bugs and integrated the automatic fetching better into the current Nepomuk system.

The new WebMiner-Service respects the suspend/resume and event monitoring (no internet, low diskspace, on battery mode) in the same was the FileIndexer does it.

When the automatic fetching is started via the command-line or dolphin command, the service is used for the actual fetching. This allows to show the current fetching progress in the nepomukcontroller (in the systray).

Starting with KDE 4.11 the Systemsettings for Nepomuk and the Nepomuk WebMiner are combined and won't show up as two different entries anymore.

Instead of the buggy imdb python script that has a hard time following the changes on the imdb website to allow proper fetching of movie resources, a new plugin for themoviedb.org was created.

The next step for the WebMiner will be the full integration into KDE SC for the 4.11 release.
So moving out of extragear again into some other proper place.

In order to make this happen there is still one large blocker task that needs to be done.

So if anyone is good with python and has some time, the script at nepomuk-core/services/storage/rcgen/nepomuk-simpleresource-rcgen.py needs to be improved.
This script is responsible to generate the SimpleResource classes from the used ontology.
As it takes nearly all ontologies into account and is rather slow right now, the call takes ~20 minutes for each generation. This is a pain for anyone compiling the WebMiner from source.